The North Carolina Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower-court ruling allowing the consolidation of the Kings Mountain School District into Cleveland County schools. The ruling comes after the Kings Mountain School Board and local parents challenged the merger, contending that it did not follow proper procedure.
Three school districts traditionally have existed in Cleveland County: Cleveland County Schools, Shelby City Schools, and Kings Mountain District Schools. In 2000, the State Board of Education approved a merger plan adopted by the Cleveland County Commission to combine the three districts into a single, countywide district.
N.C. General Statue 115C-68.1(a)(2001) provides that “[t] he board of commissioners of a county in which two or more local school administrative units are located, but all are located wholly within the county, may adopt a plan for the consolidation and merger of the units into a single countywide unit.” Such a plan then goes to the State Board of Education for final approval.
If, however, a municipal school district operates in two or more counties, the board of commissioners of all affected counties would have to approve a merger.
The Kings Mountain Board of Education, individual Kings Mountain board members, and parents of children attending public school in Kings Mountain challenged the merger. They argued that the Kings Mountain School District in fact operated in both Cleveland and Gaston counties. The consolidation, they contended, was illegal because the Gaston County Commission had not approved the merger plan.
The current municipal boundaries of Kings Mountain extend into Gaston County and the school district does serve children there. And as the Court of Appeals said, “the fundamental question on appeal is whether the legal boundaries of the Kings Mountain School District extend into Gaston County.”
The Kings Mountain School District was established by an act of the General Assembly in 1905. Its act provided “that all the territory embraced in the incorporate limits of the town of Kings Mountain shall be and is hereby constituted the ‘Kings Mountain Graded School District’ for white and colored children.” From this, the petitioners argued that the legislature intended for the school district to grow as the town did.
The appeals court rejected this argument. “The ability to create the boundaries of a school district is vested solely within the power of the legislature, however,” Judge Timmons-Goodson wrote for the court. “Thus, a municipality may not expand its school district boundaries without an express or implied delegation of legislative authority.”
The court noted that the1905 act contains no express delegation of legislative authority to the town allowing it to unilaterally expand the boundaries of the school district.
Nor could such a power be fairly implied from the wording of the law. “Notably, at the time of the 1905 act, the town of Kings Mountain was without authority to annex territory,” the Court of Appeals found. “As the town of Kings Mountain had no authority to expand its own boundaries until forty-two years after the 1905 Act was enacted, the General Assembly could not have intended the words ‘shall be’ to grant the town authority to unilaterally expand the school district.” Until 1947, all annexations in North Carolina required the consent of the legislature.
The appeals court made mention of the laws concerning city school districts in Kinston and Monroe. Both were established under laws similar to that creating the Kings Mountain School District. In both cases, the Assembly passed laws in the 1960s or 1970s specifically stating that the boundaries of the systems would grow as the cities annexed land into the city.
The case is Kings Mountain Bd. of Educ. v. N.C. State Bd. of Educ., (02-529).
Lowrey is a Charlotte-based associate editor at Carolina Journal.